Shadowdark Shadowdark General Thread [+]

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I keep looking at Dolmenwood, and my finger hovers over the "buy" button, and then I think..."No....someday they'll port it to Shadowdark."

Of course they won't do that because the system they wrote it for is their own system, which they want to sell more of. But somehow I still cling to that hope the way some people think WotC will eventually revive 4e and the Warlord.

I believe there are unofficial conversion projects underway. It wouldn't be crazy if Necrotic Gnome sold a conversion guide of their own some day.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'just make the conversions'. You'd need new classes, adjusted magic, new monster stat blocks, plus a bunch of new mechanics to handle things like Runes and Glamours. That's a little more that most GMs are going to want to free hand. Perhaps you could expand a little?

Yeah, exactly.

 

[Xenolith234]

Yeah, exactly.

I guess my question is this - is that not doable in order to maintain all of the flavor? Is that impossible without losing something in the conversion? It makes it sound like it can't be done, which I'd hope isn't the case.

 

[darjr]

Six is pretty great. I think I gotta run this.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I guess my question is this - is that not doable in order to maintain all of the flavor? Is that impossible without losing something in the conversion? It makes it sound like it can't be done, which I'd hope isn't the case.

Well....I don't think it can't be done, but I do think there will be tradeoffs, and you may end up having to make alterations to the system you're converting to in order to retain flavor.

Again without knowing much about OSE or Dolmenwood, I do know that Dolmenwood has its own playable species, and I'm guessing each of them has more features than the single feature given to Shadowdark ancestries. When converting, what kind of choices do you make? If you strip them down to a single feature are you losing "flavor"? What happens when parts of the adventures explicitly invoke the features you are leaving behind? Is that lost flavor?